Donna Wells is the CEO of Mindflash.com, a leading web platform for companies to easily share knowledge and train employees. It makes training easier, faster and more cost-effective than ever before.
These days, startups are using cloud-based business apps to store tools for virtually all of their needs. These tools are optimized for the cloud and mostly paid for on a monthly basis. Best of all, they help the company reach and exceed its sales goals so that it can deliver quality products.
At my company, we rely on Salesforce, the poster child for online relationship management tools. While Salesforce is an excellent cloud-based option, it can’t be all things to all businesses. Using supplemental cloud applications has my startup accelerate sales in new ways. As we grow, we’re always exploring new tools and looking for every advantage.
Out of the hundreds of subscription tools to help your sales and marketing efforts, here are my top five recommendations.
1. Get Satisfaction
Get Satisfaction, a Software as a Service (SaaS)-delivered helpdesk application, gives my company a simple way to manage incoming customer questions while simultaneously building a vibrant community.
Get Satisfaction can give your customers (and prospects) a place to discuss your product around the clock.This is a big benefit for a startup that wants to answer questions rapidly and engage with its user community, but that perhaps doesn’t have the resources for a 24/7 call center.Beyond customer service, the app has also proven to be a useful tool for sourcing and evaluating demand for customer-requested features. As an added bonus, Get Satisfaction helps with SEO, as all of the conversation can organically improve search rankings.
2. LivePerson
LivePerson is a sales tool for connecting with potential customers at the critical discovery stage. Every visitor who spends more than one minute on your designated landing pages is offered the chance to chat with your live representative, in real time, about your product. The LivePerson widget can be installed on any page where you foresee a customer might need assistance -- in my company's case, we currently focus on our features and pricing pages.
LivePerson also provides insight into who is on your site at any given time. You can see what page they’re reading, how many pages they’ve viewed, from which source they arrived (SEO, SEM or referral), their time zone, browser and more. And LivePerson integrates directly with Salesforce, allowing companies to evaluate whether the individual is a paying customer or a previous trial user.3. Optimizely
For most online service providers, it's critical to convert visitors and free trial users into paying customers as efficiently as possible. While you may have a website built for conversion, there are always improvements to be made.
Optimizely is a very inexpensive tool my company uses to run simple A/B tests on our pages. The app splits web traffic into test groups, and provides real-time reporting on how those groups are performing. This allows designers to make tweaks and adjustments in a short period of time. An Optimizely subscription starts at $79 per month -- a no-brainer for even the most bootstrapped of startups.4. Zuora
One of the benefits of using Salesforce as a CRM platform is that other tools play nicely with its data and interface. However, virtually all of the new cloud services need a subscription management system to meter, price and bill their customers. But subscription businesses are complicated. It’s not as simple as a one-time ecommerce transaction for books or shoes. That’s where Zuora comes in.
Zuora enables businesses to segment their customers and set pricing plans. The information is integrated into Salesforce and seamlessly carries through to billing and renewal. Zuora handles the entire recurring payment lifecycle -- credit card hassles and all.5. SEOmoz
Last but not least, SEOmoz can be used to optimize your brand's search engine presence. Though we acquire our customers through numerous channels, organic search traffic is highly valued. SEOmoz is a terrific tool that helps with SEO benchmarking and tracking. With it, you can monitor how well your pages rank, your highest performing keywords and how to boost your site to the top of search results.
Your brand will have a hard time welcoming new customers if it can't be found via search. SEOmoz is an excellent dashboard tool for monitoring and improving search efficiency.Image courtesy of iStockphoto, billoxfordMore
About: apps, business, cloud, startup
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